During the Conference of Paris I had the privilege of coming into intimate contact with all classes of Frenchmen. They did not deceive themselves. They knew well enough where they would have been after a few months of war, had they been facing Germany alone. Now that Germany was temporarily disabled, they wanted either a free hand to take strategic precautions against a renewal of German aggression, which meant the Rhine frontier, or a new defensive alliance in place of the Russian alliance. They had no faith whatever in the League of Nations. M. Clemenceau had been persuaded to give up the Rhine frontier in exchange for an agreement by the terms of which Great Britain and the United States were to come to the aid of France in case of German aggression. At the best, owing to the geographical position of the new proposed defenders, the Anglo-American guarantee was not a very certain one. After the American Senate began to attack Article X of the League of Nations Covenant, the French saw that they had been deceived. The Anglo-American guarantee was an illusion. The Treaty of Versailles, in itself, provided no permanent security for France. In Belgium I found ratification of the treaty regarded as a painful necessity. There was no enthusiasm for it, and no hope that a new order would be born of it. The prime ministers of Greece and Rumania told me that the Versailles Treaty could not be pronounced either good or bad by their countries until the other treaties with enemy countries were included. But they both felt that not peace but a series of new wars was likely to be the result of the secret _pourparlers_ among the Big Four that gave birth to the Treaty of Versailles. The minister of foreign affairs of another small nation expressed to me his belief that the incorporation of the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles killed the League’s chances of success. “How could international machinery for righting injustice and establishing a new international morality belong in a document that furnishes numerous instances of just the sort of thing the League of Nations was created to abolish?” he cried. I can see him now as he walked up and down the room, shaking both arms with elbows bended, and saying, “Pooling of interests, renunciation of special privileges, refusal to transfer territories from one sovereignty to another without consulting their inhabitants, recognition of the right of self-determination--bah! _bah!_ BAH!” The poor man had just been shown a draft of the clauses relating to his country that were to be put into the Treaty of St.-Germain.